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People
The people that participated in the processes for the formation of Greek sport came to a large extent from the middle and upper social strata of the  Greek society. As was the case in other countries during the second half of the 19th century, involvement in sport, whether this concerned physical exercise or the administration of sports institutions (associations, COG, SEAGS) and the creation of sports games, was associated with the adoption of practices of free-time management that were connected with entertainment and lent prestige. It seems that this occurred gradually during the 1870s and 1880s, when a relatively stable group of people was formed, students basically, who practised regularly and created the first organized sports nucleus in the Greek capital.
The Central Gymnasium, which was the site for sports games in the late 1880s and early 1890s, was one of the birthplaces of Greek sport. The leading figure in those developments was an active gymnast, supporter of the German gymnastic system, Ioannis Fokianos. He was one of the founders and the first president of the Panhellenic Gymnastic Society, one of the older and most active sports associations in the history of Greek sport. Another gymnast, Ioannis Chrysafis, played an important role in the first decades of the 20th century contributing to the adoption of the Swedish gymnastic system, the upgrading of the education of gymnasts and the organization of school sport.
The organization of the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896 mobilized the royal family and the intellectual, economic and social-political elite of the Greek society. The Games of 1896 were seen not only as a sports event, but rather as a "national affair" at a time when the visions related to the Great Idea were congruous. People such as the scholar and writer Dimitrios Vikelas, the professor of History Spyridon Lampros and the "revolutionary" Konstantinos Manos foresaw in the Olympic Games an ideal field of expression of the Great Idea. Therefore, Greek sport, the processes of which were accelerated thanks to the Games, was associated from the beginning with people who participated in the irredentist networks of the time and were active in the National Society and in the war of 1897, in the issue of Crete and Macedonia. The connection of the Greek irredentism networks with those of sport defined the context of activity of the Greek sports associations, both those that were active in the "national centre", such as the Panhellenic and the Ethnikos associations, and those outside the Greek boundaries, such as the Panionian and the Apollo of Smyrna.
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